Related

TORONTO — Salman Rushdie knows what it’s like to live with fear. He also knows it can be the start of a long, often difficult, and maybe bloody, road to freedom.

It’s the whole point of his Booker Prize-winning breakout novel Midnight’s Children, a fictionalized and loosely biographical account of India’s independence as witnessed through the eyes of a young man endowed with special powers via his big nose.

It’s also a fact of life he’s learned through direct confrontation with dogmatic fear and loathing in the wake of a fatwa issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted Rushdie dead after the publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses.

“I really don’t think you can do good work unless you walk to the edge of the cliff. So there is danger in making ambitious work, but you have to give yourself the right to crash. What’s the worst that could happen? You write a bad book, you make a bad movie?”

Or, someone — or many people — might want to kill you.

“Well, I’ve gone through that already,” he says with a broad smile.

“You just come to a point where you refuse to live in fear and not just of people trying to kill you, but of criticism. When you get to that point, it’s incredibly freeing.”

Rushdie says he relied on that courage when he started work on his two latest projects: Joseph Anton, his memoir due out Tuesday, Sept. 18 that bears the title of his pseudonym while in hiding, and the screenplay for Midnight’s Children, the feature film directed by Deepa Mehta, which had its Canadian premiere this week at the Toronto International Film Festival before opening the Vancouver fest at the end of the month.

“When I was a kid, I devoured the reviews of my work. You want people to like what you are doing. But once you know the road you are on, and why you are on it, it matters less and less. You just say these are the things I want to explore and if people like it, great. If they don’t, well sorry, but I have to keep going.”

Rushdie says he just doesn’t really give a flying fajita what people think any longer, and it was this profound sense of personal grounding that probably made him gravitate so naturally to Mehta, the Toronto-based director of the Oscar-nominated Water, as well as Earth, Fire and Sam and Me.

“We have known each other for ever and become close over the course of working on the movie together,” says Rushdie of his most recent creative collaborator. “She has a great heart, and that lack of crap — of any kind — makes her very attractive.”

The two originally met on the PBS show Charlie Rose, back when the titular talk show host with the round table was unable to broadcast as a result of health issues. Rushdie was asked to fill in, and that was the day Mehta was asked to chat about the final instalment in her elements trilogy.

“We made noises that one day we would work together. And eventually, we did. We agreed we should try to make a film together … and years later, here it is. Anyone who knows anything about the movie industry knows it takes four years to make a film. It’s such a passionate and intense thing to create.”

Where tthere is passion, there can be conflict, but every time Rushdie and Mehta would disagree, they hashed it out with a mutual sense of respect.

“There’s a real fondness there. So even when we disagreed, we could talk about it and move forward.”

One of the central changes between Rushdie’s original, sprawling epic and Mehta’s breathless, sweeping feature is the removal of Padma, the pickling expert at a pickle factory, who hears the whole yarn as it’s told to her by the central character, Saleem Sinai.

“You can’t go back and forth in a movie like you can in a novel. It breaks the emotional train all the time,” he says.

“Now, we tell the story to you and I think it was one of the smartest decisions we made.”

People who read the 1981 novel may note the lack of the pickle motif in general, but as Rushdie says in the book, “pickles are, despite everything, acts of love.”

He says, “it’s about preservation.” The whole point of pickling is to make the fruit last as long as possible, yet in order to do that, one must change it, without losing its essence.

“It’s what literature is, as well. These are acts of preservation. One can write about memory, but in the act of remembering, there will be distortions. Memory interferes with the actual past and that was really where Midnight’s Children came from: The errata of memory.”

On the page, the book is set in the past, moving from India’s 1947 independence to the war with Bangladesh in 1971. It was published 31 years ago, but Rushdie feels the story remains as fresh as it was then. In fact, when I suggest it’s prescient and timely, he agrees.

“It’s funny you say that because I feel the same way. It doesn’t feel dated or like a period piece. I do feel the world we live in is still in danger of these things, and just in the few screenings we had last week at Telluride, people told me it feels like a film about today,” he says.

“I can’t think of anything more gratifying as a writer, really. It’s lovely to think the work isn’t embalmed in that Merchant Ivory feeling. It’s nothing I’ve ever wanted,” Rushdie says with a laugh.

“Your big hope as any kind of creator is that you last the test of time, that way, what’s said about you in the moment doesn’t really matter. People will find your work on their own, and make their own decision about what they think of it.”

In the end, history finds its voice. “I’m so glad that I had a chance to see one of my old history professors from Cambridge and tell him just how important his words of wisdom were, because I remember one thing he told me was to never write history until you can hear the people speak in your head,” he says.

“If you can’t hear them speak, you don’t know them well enough.”

Midnight’s Children will be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, then moves to Vancouver and Calgary’s festivals before opening in Canadian theatres later.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.